[Lancaster was a noted English cartoonist and writer who designed the sets for Michael Benthall's 1953 staging of All's Well That Ends Well at the Old Vic. In the essay below, he explores the issues facing a producer of the play, maintaining that "the overriding problem … is how best to retain [the] audience's attention in the long sections when Parolles is off-stage."]

It would, manifestly, be foolish to try to maintain that All's Well That Ends Well is among the more successful of Shakespeare's works. While not wholeheartedly subscribing to the view put forward by certain critics that it is, in fact, a straight 'potboiler', it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that for once the dramatist has succumbed to the temptation, from which not even the greatest are wholely immune, to give the public what he thought it wanted.

The plot, creaking and groaning with improbabilities, which can only be resolved by that hammiest of all Elizabethan gimmicks, the GREAT BED TRICK, can barely have sufficed to hold the reader's interest in the original Boccaccio conte; transferred to the stage it demands of the audience a suspension of disbelief which even Shakespeare's skill and language are powerless to achieve. Nor, with one exception, are the characters sufficiently interesting or sympathetic to enable us to overlook the nonsensical circumstances in which they find themselves.

Not all the author's partiality can for one moment persuade us that the heroine, Helena, regarded dispassionately, is anything but a tough and ruthless little operator, determined at all costs to marry the boss's son. For an actress the role must be one of formidable difficulty as in order to maintain some sort of balance she has to endow the character with an overweight of personal charm, with little or no support from her lines, to compensate for the invariably unattractive nature of her actions.

From Bertram, on the other hand, who is presented as an obstinate young snob, incapable of realizing where his own best interests lie, it is impossible wholly to withdraw our sympathy. Admittedly a fool, there is still no denying that he finds himself in an intolerable situation, for which, as far as we can see, he is not in any way responsible. Why should he wed this bossy little orphan with whom he has been brought up and of whose company he is by now, likely enough, heartily sick? Particularly at a time when he has not yet had an opportunity of judging what alternatives the Court of France might offer. But finally, and with a scarcely credible inconsistency; by the tame way he accepts his fate, and the drivelling ineptitude with which he conducts his interview with the king, he succeeds in changing our pity to contempt.

If the character of the countess is perfectly consistent and skilfully presented it is certainly no more attractive. One needs no Freudian support to appreciate the significance of the lines with which she opens the play. 'In delivering my son from me I bury a second husband [I. i. 1]. She provides throughout the perfect case history of the dominating mother figure. Determined at all costs to retain her son as a substitute for her departed husband, the ceaseless repetition of whose virtues encourages the belief that in life he had had a pretty thin time, she is prepared to force Bertram into marriage with her beloved protegée, who is in many ways simply an extension of her own personality. The teasing aspect of the case lies in the ambivalence with which her creator regards the old monster. For it would be foolish to suppose that Shakespeare was unaware of the deeper motives which underlie her actions, although he gives us no hint either of disapproval or extenuation.

The king presents no such problems. He is simply a lay-figure, a necessary part of the machinery of the plot, and nothing more. Adversely to criticize the Old Vic production of 1952 for making him a hypochondriacal figure of fun, mumbling unexceptionable platitudes, seems therefore, unjustified. Without some such element of the farcical the tedium of the Court scenes would be almost unbearable.

Nor can it be said that the secondary characters add much to the excitement. Lafeu, that stock Shakespearean figure 'an old Lord', is a more sensible, less garrulous, and therefore less theatrically effective, Polonais, and Lavache must come very high on the list of the more intolerable of Shakespeare's clowns, the majority of whose wise-cracks are always likely, mercifully, to be abandoned in production.

Fortunately there remains Parolles. While the rest of the cast, with the partial exception of the countess, have little or no relevance to Ufe as we know it today, and must, even within the accepted conventions of the Elizabethan stage, always have seemed remote, Parolles is vital, three-dimensional, timeless. He is the eternal fixer, whose combinazioni are always doomed to go wrong; the wide boy so sharp that he must always cut himself. Fertile in invention, tireless in name dropping, forever wearing a club tie to which he is not entitled, he is far too familiar a figure for us to feel for him in his hour of humiliation the embarrassed pity which Malvolio excites. Parolles we know will always bob up again, for Malvolio there can be no real future.

Moreover, like Falstaff, Parolles has the gift of self knowledge, and his great speech in Act 4, 'Simply the thing I am shall make me live' [IV. iii. 333], is certainly, given an actor of Mr Hordern's merit, the most effective moment in the whole play. But the comparison with Falstaff, although inevitable, can be pushed too far; Falstaff for all his cowardice, trickery and self-indulgence remains a gentleman by birth, to whom some tattered vestiges of dignity still cling, even when exploding the whole concept of'honour', but Parolles' claims to nobility are not for one moment to be believed either by him or us, and could not possibly carry conviction with anyone less dismally stupid than Bertram.

The difficulty created by the tameness of most of the characters and the overwhelming vitality of one are not unfortunately resolved or redeemed by any outstanding poetic merit in the text. In this play Shakespeare is at his most gnomic, and the verse varies from the tiresomely-elaborate to the distressingly trite. In particular, there is an over-abundance of the flattest rhyming couplets.

More should I question thee, and more I must,
Though more to know could not be more to
  trust,
From whence thou camest, how tended on: but
  rest
Unquestioned welcome and undoubted blest.
Give me some help here, hoa! If thou proceed
As high as word, my deed shall match thy deed.
                                [II.i.205-10]

After a few minutes of this sort of thing one begins to wonder whether, in fact, 'Savanarola Brown' has not had a hand in the composition.

It will be readily appreciated that All's Well That Ends Well is not, therefore, an easy play to mount. The overriding problem which faces the producer is how best to retain his audience's attention in the long sections when Parolles is off-stage. To accomplish this he is surely perfectly justified in using every trick of the trade and every elaboration of setting, for of all Shakespeare's plays, All's Well That Ends Well is the least likely to suffer from overproduction.

There is, however, one line of approach for which sufficient justification exists in the text and which the intelligent producer—and his designer—will exploit to the utmost—the contrast of the two main settings. On the one hand Rossillion and the Court of France, medieval old fashioned, hierarchic; on the other Renaissance Florence, tough, realistic modern. The whole ridiculous situation can only receive some degree of rational support if we conceive of it—as Shakespeare well may have—as a conflict between two ways of life, one doomed, the other expanding. The static, strictly-graded world of sixty-four quarterings into which poor Bertram was born, controlled by a semi-sacred sovereign with absolute power to interfere in the private lives of even the most exalted of his subjects, and the go-getting, uninhibited world of swift-moving condottieri where all actions are judged by results. The only possible theatrical justification for Helena is that she provides the link between the two; while paying lip-service to the conventions by which the countess and the king are guided, she is, nevertheless, a sufficiently contemporary character to have no hesitation in employing stratagems for which Parolles is soundly condemned. Seen in this light her move to Florence acquires a symbolic significance. In the same context moreover, Parolles himself becomes more meaningful; he is no longer an isolated 'character' in the Jonsonian sense but one whose attitude can be regarded as providing, by way of contrast and exaggeration, a sharp commentary on that of his noble companions. The little stratagem over the lost drum fails ludicrously; Helena's impersonation trick comes off. But in both cases the object of the exercise is purely selfish and the means employed unquestionably ignoble.

Fundamentally All's Well is therefore a profoundly cynical play, and is best treated as such. Unhappily, the producer's task is rendered almost impossible by Shakespeare's reluctance openly to define his attitude. The happy conclusion so firmly proclaimed in the title and so unconvincingly arrived at must be accepted at its face value; all doubts must be implied, never stated. On one plane we must not question the assumption that all is well that ends well; on another we must remain uneasily aware that it is highly questionable whether this end does justify these means. But the fact that a perfect balance is unlikely ever to be achieved in performance, that the underlying ambivalence cannot properly be stated in theatrical terms, is hardly the fault of the producer.